The "Apocalyptic" literature of the Bible -- namely, Daniel,
Revelation, Mark 13 and parallels, et al. -- has been somewhat of
an embarrassment to "mainline" Christians. This is partly due to
an awareness that the most extreme of groups -- for example, David
Koresh and his Branch Dividians, who tragically met their fiery
end in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993 -- use the apocalyptic
literature as their focus. In general, Christians remain both
uncomfortable but also fascinated by the violent imagery and the
apparent "end of the world" thinking. Many "mainline" preachers
have a difficult time when these passages appear in the
lectionary.

Help is now available, manifested in the work of numerous recent
scholars, for Christians stricken with 'apocalypticitis.' I would
like to call your attention to two in particular, two whom I often
feature in these pages, René Girard and N. T. Wright.
The work of Girard and his students has addressed the concern for
what appears to be divine violence in apocalyptic literature,
which I will say more about in this introduction. Wright’s
position is supportive of the Girardian view on violence (though
independent of it), but he takes on the "end of the world"
thinking more directly. In general, Wright has written with a
clarity that is extremely helpful in addressing concerns about
apocalyptic, a concern he has taken on because he revives and
revises Schweitzer's thesis that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.
He thus places apocalyptic at the center of the Christian faith,
if we are to take history seriously and to finally understand what
it means to have been a first-century Jewish apocalyptic prophet.
There is more on Wright's work under the scripture passages
themselves.

René Girard first began to address the notion of
apocalyptic violence already in Things
Hidden (e.g., pp. 185-190). He is interested in
drawing a "main lesson" from his analysis that, "The notion of
divine violence has no place in the inspiration of the gospels"
(p. 189). But then he has to explain the presence of apocalyptic
violence in the gospels. If this is not divine violence, then what
kind of violence is it? Where does it come from? His answer:

The theme of the Christian Apocalypse involves human
terror, not divine terror: a terror that is all the more likely to
triumph to the extent that humanity has done away with the sacred
scarecrows humanists thought they were knocking over on their own
initiative, while they reproached the Judeo-Christian tradition
for striving to keep them upright. So now we are liberated. We
know that we are by ourselves, with no father in the sky to punish
us and interfere with our paltry business. So we must no longer
look backward but forward; we must show what man is capable of.
The really important apocalyptic writings say nothing except that
man is responsible for his history. You wish for your dwelling to
be given up to you; well then, it is given up to you. (p.
195)

In short, the potentiality of apocalyptic violence would be
generated by human beings, not God. Girard extends this discussion
of the Apocalypse on pp. 250-262, with many other interesting things
to say; for example, that Mutually Assured Destruction (still in
place when he wrote this in the 70's) is "human violence in a
sacralized form" (p. 255).

It is important, I think, to understand the Girardian explanation
of apocalyptic violence. Sacrificial violence is a sacred,
sanctioned violence that comes into place in order to keep in
check the fearsome profane, random violence. A sacrificial crisis,
in the Girardian parley, occurs when the effectiveness of the
sacrificial institutions is waning such that the sacrificial
violence loses its effectiveness in containing profane violence.
If a new sacrificial solution does not come into play, then the
profane violence grows into apocalyptic violence. Throughout human
history we see cycles of being on the verge of such violence and
then new sacrificial solutions come into play to again bring
relative peace. During the sacrificial crises, there are often
cries of the Final Apocalypse, a violence that will finally
consume us. And in sacralized settings, this apocalyptic violence
is attributed to the deity: the gods will bring a resounding
judgment that will punish the wicked and reward the just. To the
mind under the influence of the Sacred, apocalyptic violence is
the ultimately divine sacred violence.

But Girard argues that the continuing effect of the Gospel in
history is to desacralize, i.e., to make it clear to us that
violence is not of the true God; violence is ours alone. (In the
above quote from Girard, he suggests that the humanists think they
invented desacralization on their own, but, from a Girardian
perspective, it is actually due to the continuing work of the
Paraclete in history.) It begins with a small band of disciples
who have witnessed the resurrection of the Innocent One who was
crucified by those sacralized powers of violence and raised from
the dead by the true God in Vindication. As more and more people
come to see the revelation (apocalypse in the Greek) of
sacred violence, however, it also means the increasing
ineffectiveness of the sacrificial institutions to contain mimetic
violence. The times of sacrificial crises increasingly come closer
together, and what looms on the horizon is the possibility of a
truly apocalyptic violence: a sacrificial crisis in which a new
sacrificial solution cannot assert itself because the revelation
of the cross has finally made such solutions impossible. In short,
the Apocalypse would be a sacrificial crisis that doesn't result
in a new sacrificial solution -- no sanctioned violence to contain
the random, mimetic violence. And this is a possibility that the
revelation of the cross and resurrection bring about and that the
work of the Paraclete slowly has made more real. Girard contends
that this is why the New Testament is realistic about the
possibility of apocalyptic violence -- because it is the Gospel
itself which disarms the powers of sacred violence.

The other important anthropological/theological move here is to
recognize the transformation of earlier, sacralized versions of
apocalypse, in which the gods carry out the apocalyptic violence
themselves, into what is more properly called Christian
eschatology. The subject of James Alison's Raising Abel is essentially
all about this transformation from sacralized apocalypse to
desacralized Christian eschatology. It recognizes the existence of
apocalyptic literature in the New Testament but endeavors to show
how it is undergoing a transformation. (More below under the
gospel text.)

Another basic question to address would be: Are there really
signs of being closer to the Apocalypse as we move to the Third
Millennium? It is tempting to simply scoff at the Hal Lindsey's
and the many sectarian groups who seem to relish the thought of
the Apocalypse. And we do, of course, need to be critical of their
re-sacralized versions which bring back a divine violence very
prominently into the picture. But with our Girardian lenses of
seeing history in terms of cycles of sacrificial crises and their
solutions, are we beginning to see some differences that make
apocalyptic human violence too close for comfort?

One such difference we've already alluded to: Enlightenment
humanism's tendency to desacralize and then take the credit for
it. When we desacralize our perspectives, according to this view,
it is simply because we are finally a more enlightened humanity.
We're growing up out of our superstitious, childish beginnings.
For this desacralized modern society, we no longer have recourse,
then, to violence sanctioned by the gods. It is simply our own
sanctioned violence working to contain the unsanctioned (i.e.,
profane) violence. The question is whether or not a humanly
sanctioned violence is transcendent enough to work. Or will we
eventually end up in a sacrificial crisis with no new solutions of
sanctioned, sacrificial violence? Enlightenment humanism offers us
the truth of desacralization (which they typically claim as their
own truth). But that leaves us with only human possibilities to
arrive at the solutions to our violence. They are correct to
reject the sacralized solutions offered by the false gods
(including Christian false gods). But does this position also
preclude the fact that the true God might be trying to offer us a
wholly different alternative?

I believe that the Christian revelation offers us the only truly
different answer: the true God who has submitted to our
sacrificial violence in the cross of Christ and planted the seeds
for its final defeat through the power of the resurrection, which
is continuously working to renew creation through the Holy Spirit,
the Paraclete. And the cross reveals to us that the nature of this
defeat over sacred violence is decidedly not by violent overthrow.
The divine solution recognizes that sacred violence cannot be
overthrown by more sacred violence. Rather, God's answer is the
power of forgiveness and sanctification in the face of the powers
and principalities of violence. God's work of salvation through
Christ and the Holy Spirit makes possible both the re-formation of
our very identities (Holy Baptism) in non-rivalrous desire (agape-love),
and the re-formation of our life in community (Holy Communion)
without having to scapegoat victims (sacrificial violence). And,
contra humanism, these necessary re-formations are impossible on
our own.

I'll conclude these opening comments with the best Girardian
summary on apocalypse, a brilliant paragraph from Gil Bailie:

The word "apocalypse" means "unveiling." What, then, is
veiled, the unveiling of which can have apocalyptic consequences?
The answer is: violence. Veiled violence is violence whose
religious or historical justifications still provide it with an
aura of respectability and give it a moral and religious monopoly
over any "unofficial" violence whose claim to "official" status it
preempts. Unveiled violence is apocalyptic violence precisely
because, once shorn of its religious and historical
justifications, it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from the
counter-violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and
cultural privilege, violence simply does what unveiled violence
always does: it incites more violence. In such situations, the
scope of violence grows while the ability of its perpetrators to
reclaim that religious and moral privilege diminishes. The
reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin
completely out of control. (Violence
Unveiled, p. 15)

Link here for a sermon entitled "The End of the World?", wading
through some of these question about apocalyptic. It was
delivered in 1997 as the United States was deliberating whether it
needed to use military action to force Iraq to abide by the Gulf War
treaty. See also "My Core
Convictions (especially beginning with Part
II)," which elaborates many of these themes around an
'apocalyptic' statement from Martin Luther King, Jr.: "It is
no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It
is either nonviolence or nonexistence."

Daniel 12:1-3

Resources

1. N. T. Wright, The
New Testament and the People of God, p. 322. In
general, Wright's work on the Book of Daniel is the key to this
first volume in his monumental project of "Christian Origins and
the Question of God." "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," pp.
248-259 in this first volume, and all of chapter ten, "The Hope of
Israel," are the most essential reading from this book for setting
up what is to come in the subsequent volumes.

In "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," for example, Wright
addresses the charge that Jewish apocalyptic falls into dualisms
that betray monotheism. His sorting
through
the various senses of “duality” (excerpt) goes a long
way to set the record straight. Does it help, for example, when
confronted in this text with the "duality" between those who are
raised to everlasting life, as opposed to those raised to shame
and everlasting contempt?

Chapter Ten, "The Hope of Israel," focuses on a wholistic reading
of Daniel, in order to set the record straight on Jewish
apocalyptic. As mentioned in the introduction above, one of his
central points addresses what has traditionally been interpreted
(by Schweitzer, for example) as "end of the world" thinking. In my
opinion, Wright couldn't be more clear and convincing in leading
to the conclusion:

There is, I suggest, no good evidence to suggest
anything so extraordinary as the view which Schweitzer and his
followers espoused. As good creational monotheists, mainline Jews
were not hoping to escape from the present universe into some
Platonic realm of eternal bliss enjoyed by disembodied souls after
the end of the space-time universe. If they died in the fight for
the restoration of Israel, they hoped not to ‘go to heaven’, or at
least not permanently, but to be raised to new bodies when the
kingdom came, since they would of course need new bodies to enjoy
the very much this-worldly shalom, peace and prosperity
that was in store. (p. 286)

Consider the popular Christian views of heaven, or the "end of the
world." According to Wright's analysis, are they Platonist or
Jewish? Wright ended up taking the planned conclusion to Vol. 2 (Jesus and the Victory of God)
regarding resurrection and turning it into an 800-page Vol. 3, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, because the issue of popular Christian views on the
after-life is so important. Many of the popular Christian views of
an after-life are closer to Plato's view of disembodied souls going
to a realm of eternal essences than to the Jewish view of
resurrection of the body when God's Kingdom, the Creation, comes
into its fullness.

2. Frederick Niedner, "Midwife Michael's Birthing
Room Apocalypse," from his annual preaching commentaries at the
Valparaiso Institute
of Liturgical Studies (ca., April 2000). In 2006, I
preached a sermon, "The
Baptismal Birthing Room," that merged some of the insights
from Wright, Alison, et al., with Niedner's preaching suggestions,
especially his rich imagery around birth pangs.

Reflections and Questions

1. Here we read the concluding assurances to the righteous that
comes with a resurrection of the dead. It is generally recognized
that Mark (and Jesus?) has taken his title of the Son of Man from
the apocalypse of Daniel. Much of the imagery in Mark 13 is also
linked with Daniel 7-12. See more below under Mark 13.

2. In 2006 I linked to a Journal of Biblical Literature
(Spring 2003, 3-21) article by John J. Collins "The
Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,"
which, from my point of view, falls too much into the trap of
seeing the violence in the Bible so thoroughly and pervasively
that he doubts the message of salvation about violence. He
references a Girardian view twice (p. 11, n. 41, and p. 19, n.
79), calling it a "selective reading." After quoting Girardian
James Williams on the "God of victims," Collins writes:

Such a selective reading, privileging the death of
Jesus, or the model of the suffering servant, is certainly
possible, and even commendable, but it does not negate the force
of the biblical endorsements of violence that we have been
considering. The full canonical shape of the Christian Bible, for
what it is worth, still concludes with the judgment scene in
Revelation, in which the Lamb that was slain returns as the
heavenly warrior with a sword for striking down the nations. In
short, violence is not the only model of behavior on offer in the
Bible, but it is not an incidental or peripheral feature, and it
cannot be glossed over. The Bible not only witnesses to the
innocent victim and to the God of victims, but also to the hungry
God who devours victims and to the zeal of his human agents. (p.
19-20)

This misunderstands the Girardian reading that does not gloss over
the pictures of a god who devours victims. Part of the Girardian
reading is to acknowledge that the Bible is also honest about its
idolatrous images of a violent God even as it is the process of
revealing that god as idol. On the journey to reveal the false gods
of sacred violence, the Bible itself still partakes of those false
gods in a forthrightness about the violence. In mythology one has a
gradual covering over of the violence. In the Bible, one witnesses a
gradual unveiling of the violence. As such, it is typically filled
with more violence than mythology.

Perhaps the best Girardian explanation of this can now be found
in Mark Heim's chapter on the Hebrew Scriptures, ch. 3,
"The Voice of Job," in Saved from Sacrifice.
I quote from his concluding section of this chapter:

What is violence doing in the Bible? It is telling us
the truth, the truth about our human condition, about the
fundamental dynamics that lead to human bloodshed, and most
particularly, the truth about the integral connection between
religion and violence. There is no way to be truthful without
exhibiting these things. If we complain that the tales of Genesis
and the bloody sacrifices of Leviticus, and the fire for revenge
in the Psalms, are too sordidly, familiarly human to have any
place in religious revelation, we make an interesting admission
that they reveal our humanity all too well. We always knew this
was the way things were, we claim. We don’t need a religious text
to tell us so. We need cures, not diagnosis. But is that true?
What if our cures need diagnosing?

Chapter 2 suggested that there are at least some crucial kinds
of violence whose nature has not been evident to us at all,
those kinds of violence whose very role is to stem our
conflicts. A simple way to put it would be to say that our
reconciling violence is not evident to us, but always goes under
another name: revenge, purification, divine sacrifice. If that
is a basic fact of human life, then where violence is not being
faced it is being justified. Where it is not being explicitly
described, it is not absent, but invisible. To exhibit violence
is to run the risk of enflaming people’s appetite for it. But to
veil it under euphemism and mythology, to be piously silent
before its sacred power, is to make its rule absolute.

In places (such as the passage from Leviticus that we quoted
above) the only real revelatory dimension we can see in the text
is that it begins to show us what was usually hidden (not what
should be our ideal). Yet even that small step is harder than we
understand. Critics of Christianity attack the “violent God of
the Old Testament” as the sociopathic cousin in an extended
family of much better adjusted deities. But the offense of the
Bible might be put the other way around. It suggests that the
better-adjusted deities are (literally) a myth. Take the crudest
form in which the biblical God appears — a vengeful divine
warrior crushing enemies, a deity who delights in blood as the
cost and sign of commitment and reconciliation. This is the
place to start because this is what the gods of the traditional
sacred are. And they are no less powerful where people have
stopped going to the religious temple or altar.

The God described in the Bible appears in a variety of
characterizations. The God represented in the passage about
collective stoning in Leviticus looks different from the God
presented in Amos or Isaiah, for instance. Such diversity is a
cue for valuable critical-historical investigation. That
investigation can lead to a strategy of interpretation in which
some textual traditions are preferred over others or earlier,
more “primitive” ideas of God may be disregarded in favor of
what are taken to be later, more sophisticated ones. If applied
narrowly, this approach would suggest that there is no truth
revealed in the earlier or the contrasting pictures of God that
would be lost when we pass on to later, preferred ones. And this
leads us to wonder why the historically or theologically less
valued elements should have a place in scripture at all. But at
least in some cases this variety embodied in the biblical
narrative may be a crucial part of the truth that it has to
impart. According to the picture we have been building, certain
characterizations of sacrificial violence and God’s relation are
a crucial part of the whole narrative. They reveal something
very important, something not duplicated elsewhere, and
something of continuing relevance. They are a necessary part of
our understanding, even while they are not themselves a
sufficient model for our behavior.

Why, then, doesn’t the Bible just describe these things as the
nature of other gods and religions, and make it clear
that this does not apply to the true God, the biblical God, our
God, who is always untouched by them? Then we could have the
benefit of the analysis of such practices without any suggestion
that they belong to our own faith. But such externalization
would dramatically amplify the dangers of triumphalism that have
been real enough as it is. Instead, the Bible’s presentation
makes it uncomfortably clear that this description does apply to
our God and our religion, since they can easily be entangled in
just the same sacrificial dynamic and have been. The scapegoat
critique in the biblical tradition emerges as a critique of
that tradition. This is the weight of the prophetic voices, who
reminded Israel that despite the calling of the new and true God
they steadily fell away into the old ways, doing so even in the
name of God. The way the story is told to us who belong to it
forbids that we should suppose we are exempt from the danger it
discovers.

What is violence doing in the Bible? It is showing us the
nature of the mimetic conflict that threatens to destroy human
community. It is showing us the religious dynamic of
scapegoating sacrifice that arises to allay such crisis. It is
letting us hear the voices of the persecuted victims and their
pleas for revenge and vindication. It is showing God’s judgment
(even violent judgment) against violence, and most particularly,
God’s siding with the outcast victims of scapegoating
persecution. The Old Testament is an antimyth. It is thick with
bodies, the voices of victims and threatened victims. This
landscape is either the product of an idiosyncratic,
bloodthirsty imagination or the actual landscape of history and
religion. If the latter, then what is remarkable is not that the
scriptures describe it, but that we should think it normal not
to. (pp. 101-103)

I highly recommend getting and reading not only the whole chapter
but the entire book.

1. For me this lesson connects this week with the destruction of
the Temple and the fact that Jesus came to offer us an alternative
to end sacrifice. It beautifully focuses our attention on that
alternative to sacrificial violence: forgiveness of sins.

Mark 13:1-8

Exegetical Notes

1. In these verses, we also have the first of numerous
occurrences of words meaning "see" in this chapter:

I have a personal theory about Mark's gospel (based primarily on Mary
Ann Tolbert's reading of Mark in Sowing
the Gospel), that one of his primary structuring
elements is his quote from Isaiah 6 about the people having eyes but
not seeing, and having ears but not hearing. There are only two
extended 'discourses' in Mark, chapters 4 and 13. The first sermon
features the quote from Isaiah and the catchword "Listen!" In
between come healings of deaf people and then blind people. Then,
the catchword "Watch!" is featured in the second sermon. In the face
of the difficulties of seeing and hearing (posed by the veil of the
Sacred), Jesus pleads with his disciples to listen and to watch.
They fail the test of listening earlier, and the final test for
watching comes in the Garden of Gethsemane, which they also fail.
Perhaps they can only begin seeing what they need to see when the
veil to the Holy of Holies is torn apart upon Jesus' death. For
more, see comments on the gospel for Proper
25B.

Resources

1. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred,
pp. 35-40. Remember, Hamerton-Kelly begins his commentary on
Mark's gospel with chapter 11, since he takes Jesus' main focus to
be the revelation of the Sacred as focused in the Temple of Jesus'
time.

It seems to me that what we have with Jesus is precisely
and deliberately the subversion from within of the apocalyptic
imagination. What I have called the eschatological imagination is
nothing other than the subversion from within of the apocalyptic
imagination. That is, Jesus used the language and the imagery
which he found around him to say something rather different (p.
125).

That something different is what Alison sketches out, including
pruning God of violence, the revelation of God as love, and creation
in Christ.

So how does he deal with passages like Mark 13? I'll close this
week's notes with Alison's extended comments on Mark 13 (pp.
145-149) [Two notes that help in reading this passage. (1) The
previous section has commented on the evangelist John's theology
of the Paraclete as Defense Counselor. (2) The previous chapter
has concluded with Alison's parable of Abel coming back to
confront his brother Cain, who expects terrible vengeance, but
instead receives mercy and forgiveness.]:

iii. Mark: the subtlety of the Hour

Mark 13 is probably the earliest among the eschatological
discourses we have in the synoptic Gospels, and it begins,
significantly, with the prophecy of the destruction of the
Temple. Shortly afterwards, Peter, James, John and Andrew ask
Jesus: "Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be
the sign when all these things shall be brought to an end?" (Mk
13:4)

Please notice that the link between the prophecy of the
destruction of the Temple and the end of everything is made not
by Jesus but by the disciples, and immediately afterwards we
have one of Jesus' famous non-replies. He does not answer their
question directly but begins to give instructions for how to
live in the period which is to be inaugurated by his death. And
his instructions are negative rather than positive.

In the first place: pay no attention to people who come as
Messiah, or some sort of savior, leading many people astray.
Jesus gives to understand that his own coming will not
be of this sort. As we shall see later, his coming will be
absolutely manifest, but not with that sort of manifestation.
Secondly: do not be alarmed by the wars, battles and portents
which are to come. That is to say, not only should they not pay
attention to the possible theological value of the prophets who
come, but they must also learn to distance themselves from
attributing theological importance to the violent events of this
world. They have no such importance. Of course, these things are
going to happen, and Jesus knows very well that, precisely
because he has invalidated the easy formula for making peace,
there will be wars and nations will rise up against nations:
these are the first pains of what has been produced by him. They
are, so to speak, the negative counterpart of what he has
inaugurated, this continuous process which we have seen in the
time of Abel, the flight from false sacralization to false
sacralization, without ever leaving reciprocal violence.

In the midst of all this, the disciple must walk with care, for
he cannot associate himself with this process. Rather, this is a
description of the reality in whose midst the disciple must give
witness to his following of Jesus, of his belief in another
kingdom, distinct from the kingdoms which seek to found
themselves on reciprocal violence. In the midst of this process
the disciple will always be an outsider, and always a potential
victim, potential traitor, potential subversive, and so on. In
the midst of all this conflictual reality, the good news about
God, and the coming into existence of the arduously constructed
kingdom of universality which we have already seen, will be
borne slowly and almost silently to all nations.

It seems to me very significant that it be in this context that
Jesus warns against being worried in advance about what to say
before the tribunals. In a world ruled by the lynch mechanism, a
typical attitude which will come about will be that of those who
considers themselves victims, and for that reason are always
preparing themselves against accusations. Which of us has not
fantasized a trial, in the midst of accusations which we manage
to rebut by the power of our argument? Isn't this one of the
ways of proving our worth? An extraordinary and triumphant
self-justification? Well, Jesus prohibits us this fantasy. The
Holy Spirit, the defense counselor is the one who will defend
us, so that it is in the degree to which we cease to worry about
defending ourselves, which is the same as saying, cease to worry
about justifying ourselves, that the defending Spirit will
declare innocent the victims. Let us be clear that this is not a
guarantee that we're going to get off unharmed from the trials
and 'legal' lynchings of the world, for many have indeed
perished under just such circumstances, most notably Jesus.
However, in the long run, the innocence of the victim will be
established. Another way of saying this: if we are preoccupied
about our defense, then we are still prisoners of the violence
of the world. Our paranoia, our anxiousness to defend and to
justify ourselves is nothing other than that. Jesus tells us
that the Defense Counselor gives us such freedom that we do not
even have to justify or defend ourselves, and that this trial,
this process, of those who are learning to live free in the
midst of the persecuting turbulences of this world, is what
discipleship looks like in the time that is installed by his
death.

It is in this context of the collapse of all the normal forms
of building human unity, including that within the family, where
children, parents and siblings hate each other, that the patient
universality of the kingdom which does not cast out is to be
built.

Jesus then moves on to a description of something which in all
probability refers to the fall of Jerusalem, to judge by the
references to Judea: that fall will be a terrible reality, as
indeed it was. But not even that, for all its horror, is to be
read in a theological key. All of that has nothing to do with
the coming of the Messiah, and the disciple must learn not to
read that fall in theological terms, not to pay attention to
supposed signs and prodigies which will so give the impression
of coming from God, that even the elect will run the risk of
being lead astray by them.

After having laid the foundations about that to which one must
not pay attention, Jesus turns to describing his coming.
In the first place he uses apocalyptic language, taken from the
book of Daniel: the sun will be darkened, the moon will give
forth no light, and so on. Now, please notice that this way of
talking does not indicate some supposed divine
intervention shaking up these heavenly bodies. The language
depends on the Semitic vision of earth and sky as a single
reality where the stars, the sun and the moon were hung in the
vault of heaven. What is being described is the way in which earthly,
that is to say, human violence, shakes all of creation. We are
speaking, once again of human violence, a social and cultural
upheaval of ever greater magnitude. It is in the midst of a
human violence which shakes the foundations of all creation that
the Son of man will be seen on the clouds, in strength and
majesty. That vision of the Son of man, as we have already seen,
comes from Daniel, and the clouds will be appearing again
shortly. It is starting from this appearance of the Son of man
that the angels will come out to gather together the chosen ones
from every corner of the earth.

After this Jesus speaks to the disciples about the fig tree.
You will remember that, not long before, he had cursed the fig
tree which was barren, even though it was not the season for
figs (Mark 11:12-14). The fig tree symbolizes both Israel and
the Temple, and Jesus is bringing about a new fig tree, which
will produce fruit, and it is in the degree to which this new
fig tree produces fruit in the midst of the circumstances which
Jesus has just described that the disciples will start to
understand that the coming of the Son of man is at the door. And
all this will happen in this generation, the generation which
begins with Jesus' death, and which will begin to live the
fruits of the uncovering of the innocence of the victim. Jesus
is quite clear: heaven and earth will pass away, but his words
will not pass away. That is to say, the teaching which he has
come to bring, leaving open and exposed the mechanism of the
randomly chosen victim will be, from now on, the inexorable,
though hidden, dynamic of history, and it is in its light that
everything will be reconceptualized -- which has in fact
happened. Once said what Jesus said, it can never be totally
hidden again, and any attempt to do so (like, for example, the
Nazi attempt) fatally fails in the long run.

At the end of his discourse, Jesus returns to the initial
question of his disciples, so as to refuse them an answer to
their question "when?". It is not a matter of a "when"; it's
about how always to be alive to the presence of the victim. It
is a question of the basic attitude of the disciple in the time
inaugurated by Jesus' death: always to have the capacity for a
flexibility of vision so as to recognize the victim, wheresoever
that victim be, and under whatsoever form they appear, so as to
know how to go out to meet them. The whole of the time between
the death of Jesus and the end of history gyrates around this
dynamic of having sight made flexible by knowing how to receive
the victim.

After this there follows one of the most brilliant passages in
Mark, which in a certain sense gives the key for reading all
that has gone before. The master goes off, handing out tasks,
and demanding that the servants remain alert: "Watch ye
therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh,
at evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning:
lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping..." (Mk 13:35-36)

With this we understand something fundamental about Mark: that
he writes in a self-referential way. For this passage, the last
before the beginning of the Passion, refers exactly to the
events of the Passion which are to unfold. The coming of the
master will take place in the handing over of Jesus, for
it is at evening that he hands himself over to the disciples in
the form of the Eucharist, at midnight that he is handed over by
Judas, who comes when the disciples are asleep; at cockcrow he
is betrayed (handed over) by Peter, and at dawn he is handed
over by the High Priest to the Romans for execution.

Just in case we have not understood this, Jesus repeats before
the High Priest the phrase about the coming of the Son of man on
the clouds, telling him that he will himself see this
phenomenon:"...and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the
right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven." (Mk
14:62)

Then, in the scene of the crucifixion, even though it was
midday, the whole sky was darkened (the raised Son of man coming
on clouds), and immediately after Jesus expires, that is, hands
over his Spirit, there begins the process of the angels who seek
out the chosen ones from the four winds, for it is a Roman
centurion who says: "Truly this man was the Son of God." (Mk
15:39)

I hope that you see some of the threads of subtlety which are
to be found beneath Mark's text. The so-called apocalyptic
discourse of Jesus is nothing other than a brilliant exercise in
the subverting from within of the apocalyptic imagination. It
has as its end to teach the disciples how to live in the times
that are to come, the time which I called 'of Abel'. Above all
it seeks to train the disciples with respect to what must be
their deepest eschatological attitude: the absolutely flexible
state of alert so as to perceive the coming of the Son of man,
the one who is seated at the right hand of God, in the most
hidden and subtle forms in which, in fact, he comes. That is, we
are dealing with instructions as to how to live with the mind
fixed on the things that are above, where Christ is seated with
God: not glued to some fantasy, but learning to perceive the
comings of the Son of Man in the acts of betrayal, of rejection,
of handing-over and of lynching. We can compare this with the
experience of Elijah on Mount Horeb, who had to learn that God
was not in the tempest, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire,
but in the still, small voice which passes by unperceived (1
Kings 19:11-13). Well, we're dealing with a similar experience:
Jesus was explaining to the disciples that the state of alert in
the face of his coming is a training in the perception, not of
that which is bruited abroad, nor of what glistens appealingly,
but of the way that all the majesty and splendor of God is to be
found in the almost imperceptible victim, on the way out of
being. [Conclusion of an extended portion from James Alison's Raising Abel, pp.
145-149.]

3. James Alison, On Being
Liked, ch. 1, "Contemplation in a world of violence,"
uses segments of Mark 13 for insightful reflections on the Twin
Towers tragedy; a talk originally given Nov. 3, 2001. Here is a
small portion of his wisdom:

The second passage I want to give you is even more
explicit, for it is the passage called the Markan Apocalypse.
Wrongly, in my view, for it is specifically concerned with undoing
the apocalyptic worldview.

Jesus starts by publicly de-sacralizing the Temple. He takes
seriously neither its sacred splendor when standing, nor the
apocalyptic meaning to be derived from its being razed to the
ground.

Mark 13:1 And as he came out of the temple, one of his
disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and
what wonderful buildings!" 2 And Jesus said to him, "Do you see
these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone
upon another, that will not be thrown down."

Peter, James and John come to him to ask him when these things
will be, and what are the signs -- they show, in other words, that
they are caught up in the apocalyptic imagination. And, as in the
passage from Luke which we have just seen, Jesus commands them to
look with different eyes.

"Take heed that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will
come in my name, saying, 'I am he!' and they will lead many
astray. 7 And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not
be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is not yet. 8 For
nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom;
there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be
famines; this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.

The first instruction is not to allow themselves to be lured or
seduced into the apparently sacred world of apocalyptic meaning,
not to allow themselves to be pulled by their desire into the
world which others will want to create. Any other messianism is
false. Wars and rumors of wars have no sacred meaning at all, and
the one who is looking at what happens through Jesus' eyes will
not be frightened of these things, not driven by them in any way.
For they are merely the signs of the collapsing world maintained
and reinforced by sacralized violence, and that collapse is itself
a sign that something very different is coming to birth.

4. N. T. Wright, Jesus
and the Victory of God, pp. 339-367, 510-519. Mark 13 is
a crucial passage for Wright's entire presentation of the Historical
Jesus, since he paints Jesus as a first-century Jewish apocalyptic
prophet. But he differs from Schweizer who thought that Jesus
expected the "end of the world" or an imminent "Second Coming."
Rather, from Wright's perspective, Jesus correctly prophesied that
continued reliance on military rebellion would result in the
destruction of the Temple and end of Jewish life as they knew it.
Along with the Temple action (the so-called "cleansing" of the
Temple, which Wright interprets as a prophecy, not a "cleansing"),
Mark 13 and parallels are Exhibit A for his argument.

1. It is a likely proposition that the impetus to write a Gospel
in the first place came from the destruction of the Temple in 70
AD. The Jewish world was in complete turmoil as one of its central
orienting symbols of faith was destroyed. The two Jewish sects
that relied on the Temple the least were poised to move on with
the greatest success -- namely, the Pharisaic centering around the
synagogue and Torah rather than the Temple and the Messianic
Judaism that became Christianity with its centering around the
person of Jesus Christ as the focal point of God's Shekinah
(presence) in the world. Jesus had prophecied the destruction of
the Temple. When that came about in 70 AD, it was time to get the
traditions of this prophet, the Messiah, the Son of God, down on
paper. The destruction of the Temple meant that Messianic Judaism
was now a more major player amidst the diversity of Judaism

2. I recently heard James Carroll speak (2006, author of
Constantine's
Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History) and he
cautions Christians about triumphalism about the Temple. The roots
of anti-Semitism are linked to a fanatical obsession among
Christians with the Temple's destruction.

3. N. T. Wright sometimes uses the helpful contemporary
phrase "earth shattering" to 'translate' the apocalyptic language
that sounds like the "end of the world." The stars falling to
earth sort of imagery was also used by the great prophets to
prophecy about "earth shattering" events that would befall the
people of Israel is they didn't repent -- real, historical events
like the sacking of Jerusalem and the taking into exile by the
Babylonians. Mark 13 prophesies precisely one of these "earth
shattering" events if God's people did not repent of their
reliance on military rebellion as the way to freedom from enemies.
The destruction of the Temple was an event that turned the Jewish
world upside-down.

Parishioners can relate to such "earth shattering" events in
their own lives around sudden, unexpected loss. The death of a
child in an accident, for example, can change one's world forever.
It can seem at first as if the sun has fallen from the sky and no
longer shines. Nothing is quite the same.